Isaiah Berlin *

Charles Blattberg
Professor of Political Philosophy
Universit de Montral

Regarded by many as a leading thinker of the twentieth century, Isaiah Berlin (19091997) was
an Oxford philosopher who specialized in the history of ideas, the philosophy of history, and
moral and political philosophy. As a child he witnessed a scene of brutality during the Russian
Revolution that had a great impact upon him, leaving him with a life-long wariness toward the
potential of ideologies such as communism to lead people to commit great cruelties; indeed
Berlin was later to become an important Cold War liberal. With respect to ethics, he is chiefly
of interest for his doctrine of value pluralism and the related account of liberty as presented in his
famous 1958 essay, Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin 2002). How the two are related has been
a matter of considerable controversy.

Value Pluralism

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human
happiness or a quiet conscience (Berlin 2002: 172). This Butler-inspired epigram could serve as
value pluralisms motto for, as will be explained below, it captures perfectly the sense in which
value pluralists conceive of the good as many rather than one. To insist that values are plural is
to reject the assumption that they can be reduced to a common unit of measure such as utility. It
is also to rule out their interlocking within a systematic theory of morals or politics made up of
formal principles such as those Kantians recommend. Even virtue ethics is to be eschewed, for
its assumption that virtuous acts always contribute to well-being rests upon a misguided faith in
what Aristotle called the unity of the virtues. For Berlin, when values conflict they will not
only often have to be compromised, because accommodated or balanced against each other, but
there will also be no way to compensate fully for those compromises. Berlin can thus be said to
endorse a version of the dirty hands thesis according to which any genuine conflict of values
necessarily entails real loss. As Bernard Williams has put it in an important essay about Berlin,
conflicts of values are often both ineliminable and not resoluble without remainder (Williams
1979: 2212). Thus is it that we are frequently doomed to choose, and every choice may entail
an irreparable loss (Berlin 1990: 13), which is why tragedy is such a recurrent theme throughout
Berlins writings.

Berlin contrasts his approach with all of the monist ones that constitute the mainstream of
Western moral and political thought. To them, it makes sense to strive for a Platonic ideal
according to which there exists a dependable path to answering every genuine question and the
answers are necessarily compatible with each other, forming a unified whole. Monists of a more
historical bent argue that those answers will arise only through dialectical development over
time, but the point is that they will, sooner or later, come. It is this, Berlin claims, that has been
at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages,
from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many
*
In Hugh LaFollette, ed., International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Hoboken, NJ and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
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to this day (Berlin 1990: 7). Berlin was led to reject monism as a result of his encounter with
Machiavellis writings and the recognition of two valid but incompatible ethics, the republican
and the Christian, that he found within them. Later, Berlin was able to identify pluralist ideas in
the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander Herzen, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, and
Giambattista Vico, among others.

But how, exactly, does Berlin conceive of these plural values? Each may be said to exist in two
dimensions: its core is abstract, in the sense of atomic or isolable and (in some cases) universal,
whereas its periphery is made up of context-dependent meanings that can overlap with those of
other values within given forms of life. Berlins stand-alone essays on equality and liberty should
thus be read as exercises in defining their cores: to isolate the pure ore of egalitarianism proper
in the first case; to resist the confusion or confounding of liberty with other values in the
second (Berlin 1978: 102; 2002: 204, 200). This accords well with the idea that everything is
what it is because, just as with Aristotelian logics principle of identity (A = A), it brings to
mind fixed and abstract things. Yet values thick peripheries mean that a value as a whole can
have somewhat different, indeed incommensurable, meanings in different contexts, which is why
a value which has more weight in one set of circumstances may have less in another (Berlin
and Williams 1994: 307).

Of course all this raises the specter of relativism. Berlin has rejected the relativist reading of his
value pluralism in four ways. The first is by pointing out that, whereas relativists tend to claim
that different peoples judgements are subjective I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We
have different tastes. There is no more to be said we should instead recognize that there is a
sense in which values are objective and so that it is possible to get them wrong (1990: 11; see
also 7984, 87). The second is through insisting that we can, by force of imaginative insight,
reach an understanding of the values of other cultures, and this means that none can be said to
exist within an impenetrable bubble (Berlin 1978; 1990: 10, 76, 8286; Jahanbegloo 1991: 109).
The third arises from Berlins assertion that there exists a minimal, though global, set of values
present in all of the worlds cultures and civilizations, one that is partly definitive of the very
idea of what it is to be human (Berlin 1964). Tthis means that if the form of life of a given
culture or society is, crudely put, made up of a hundred values then, say, five of them will be
shared with all other forms of life, thus constituting a global overlap.

Finally, the fourth way of opposing the relativist interpretation of his value pluralism is based
upon the role that Berlin believes reason can play when incommensurable values conflict. Some
have advanced an agonistic account of Berlins view of how we may respond to such conflicts,
one which assumes that incommensurable is synonymous with incomparable and so that
practical reason can be of no help (Gray 1995: 1, 44, 4654, 71; though see 155). But while there
is some justification for this reading in Berlins earlier writings (e.g. 1990: 75; 2000: 233), and
while he would certainly not rule out the possibility of such agonistic cases altogether, this was
surely not his final position. For in a late paper co-written with Williams, Berlin asserts that
when incommensurable values conflict the idea that reason has nothing to say (i.e. there is
nothing reasonable to be said) about which should prevail over the other is obviously false
(Berlin and Williams 1994: 307).
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Berlins conception of practical reason has been compared to Aristotles phronsis or practical
wisdom (Galipeau 1994: 66; Blattberg 2000: 65) and while this is appropriate for the type of
reasoning necessary for negotiating value conflicts, when it comes to statesmen developing their
ideal conceptions of what is to be done Berlins account is much closer to Aristotelian techn or
craft, as his essay on Political Judgement (1996) makes evident. Regardless, it is clear that
Berlin considers practical reasoning to require a highly contextual, not-fully-articulable sense
rather than something algorithmic. That said, he implies that rationally comparing
incommensurables can be done only against a shared background, the general pattern of life in
which we believe (2002: 47; see also 1990: 18 and 2002: 42), which suggests that such
judgements will be impossible when it comes to conflicts between values from radically different
cultures.

Liberty

Berlins account of liberty rests upon a contrast between what he identifies as the negative and
positive senses of the term. The first is concerned with answering the question What is the
area within which the subject a person or group of persons is or should be left to do or be
what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons? whereas the key issue for the
second is What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to
do, or be, this rather than that? (Berlin 2002: 169). Negative liberty, then, is a matter of freedom
from constraints whereas positive liberty is concerned with the freedom to act in ways that are
true to ones fundamental purposes. Berlins 1958 essay is chiefly a defense of the former,
although he by no means wishes to discount the latter.

The essays account of negative liberty stresses the absence of interference as its defining feature
interference, Berlin is careful to point out, whose source is other people rather than natural
causes for he means to invoke the idea of coercion. This is coercion, moreover, which limits
ones opportunities to do things that one may potentially want to do. The degree of restriction of
what one actually wants to do is not the right way to measure liberty in the negative sense;
otherwise it would become possible to adopt the strategy of increasing ones liberty simply by
limiting ones desires in the face of obstacles to realizing them. To Berlin, teaching oneself to
want only what one can get may contribute to happiness or security but these are values separate
from liberty. Greater liberty, then, ought to be equated with a greater area of non-interference
and nothing else (Berlin 2002: 16978).

Positive liberty, by contrast, is deeply concerned with desires since its partisans put great store in
the quality of our motivations to realize our selves. They do so because they believe that it is
indeed possible for natural instincts, say, to interfere with someones liberty since succumbing to
them could mean that the person was not being true to his or her self. Understood in its positive
sense, then, liberty consists of being ones own master. Yet an individuals true self may not
reside strictly within him or her since people should be conceived as parts of social wholes.
This means that conflicts could arise between what one thinks is right for oneself and what
others, supposedly more aware of societys goals, think is right for you. Hence Berlins chief
worry about positive liberty, which is that it makes possible the belief that we may coerce others
for their own sake and that doing so is compatible with, indeed is required by, their liberty.
Berlin thus opposes doctrines such as those based upon Rousseaus famous claim that it is
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possible to force people to be free, doctrines that have given succor to many oppressive regimes
above all the totalitarian ones of the twentieth century (Berlin 2002: 17887, 194, 209-10).

Despite its sharp dichotomy between positive and negative, there is nevertheless a confusion that
bedevils Berlins 1958 essay. Because there are times when it seems to be about a single value,
liberty, with positive and negative presented as different ways of interpreting its core, and others
when positive and negative liberty appear as independent ultimate values (2002: 217) in their
own right. One way to clear this up would be to accept (as Berlin can, to an extent, be interpreted
as doing in 2002: 4042, 49) that at least three distinct values have legitimate claims on the term
(i) the liberty of the individual; (ii) the liberty of the nation (which arises from its self-
determination and recognition); and (iii) the liberty of the civic or political community (wherein
citizens participate in self-government) and then to read Berlins essay as being essentially
about the best way to conceive of (i). As such, negative liberty can be considered a rival to other
accounts of individual liberty, including autonomy (in Kants sense, which equates it with self-
government by a rational will; or in Humbolt and Mills, which sees self-government in terms of
originality; or in Joseph Raz and Will Kymlickas, which emphasizes the ability to choose
between options), self-ownership, non-domination, capabilities, and authenticity.

This last conception is the version of individual liberty that Charles Taylor defends as an
alternative to Berlins negative view. According to Taylor, liberty requires that we exercise
discriminations among motivations and so make judgments of degrees of freedom [that are]
based on the significance of the activities or purposes which are left unfettered (Taylor 1979:
192). This implies that liberty is inconceivable if it is disconnected from other values since they
underlie the activities or purposes in question. Yet Berlin the conceptual atomist can be said to
favor the negative conception precisely because he sees it as the best way of keeping liberty
separate. That is why he thinks we should identify an area bounded by frontiers in a way that
prevents whatever monstrous impersonation or sleight of hand is responsible for confusing
individual liberty with other values, for if either clarity of thought or rationality in action is not
to be hopelessly compromised, such distinctions are of critical importance (2002: 30, 180, 181,
49). It has been argued, however, that distortion rather than clarity comes from distinguishing
even just the cores of values in an atomic way and that doing so leads value pluralists to an
overly adversarial, because clashing or colliding, conception of their conflicts. And the
problem with this is that it rules out the reconciliation, as distinct from accommodation, of those
conflicts, making a thoroughly dirty and often tragic politics inevitable (Blattberg 2000).

Value Pluralism, Liberty, and Liberalism

The theme of conceptual atomism is but one way of relating Berlins views on liberty to his
value pluralism. The other, more popular, means of doing so has been to point to Berlins
assertion that value pluralism entails a certain measure of negative liberty (2002: 216; see also
21317). The idea here is that, given the plurality of values in the world and the need to respond
to their conflicts, one must have the freedom to choose in order to do so properly. But how much
freedom, exactly? An immense amount has been one of Berlins answers to the question, one
that can (albeit uneasily) be associated with his taking an absolute stand on the inviolability
of a minimum extent of individual liberty as an essential part of what we mean by being a
normal human being (2002: 214, 210; see also 173). Those who have made this association tend
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to assert that there exists a direct connection between Berlins value pluralism and his liberalism,
indeed that the latter may be logically derived from the former. Yet by absolute Berlin clearly
does not mean uncompromisable (2002: 52, 212), nor (despite the quotation above) does he
ignore the possibility of abnormal conditions wherein no amount of liberty can be inviolable
(2002: 52). And regardless, Berlins reference to a minimum area of personal freedom must
still be contrasted with the extreme demand for liberty that was made by the fathers of
liberalism, they who evidently want more than this minimum (2002: 173, 207).

Moreover, logically deriving Berlins preferred political ideology from his moral and political
philosophy runs against the anti-monistic thrust of the latter since it assumes that it can be
articulated in a wholly self-sufficient and non-contradictory way (Blattberg 2000: ch. 2; 2009: 7).
This, it seems, is why Berlin has declared that pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even
overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic. I believe in both
liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected (Jahanbegloo 1991: 44). So the
relation between Berlins value pluralism and his liberalism must be contingent (Gray 1995: ch.
6; Blattberg 2009: 1114). Some thinkers, however, continue to claim that the two are
intrinsically linked, arguing either that Berlin successfully demonstrated this to be so (Galipeau
1994: ch. 5), that he did not but that it can nevertheless be done (Crowder 2004: chs. 67), or that
he was ultimately unconcerned about whether they are connected or not (Weinstock 1997: 494).
Yet all this fails to appreciate that liberals do not need philosophy to confer special status upon
their cherished values in order to be good liberals; indeed, if anything, Berlin himself suggests
the opposite: To realise the relative validity of ones convictions, he declared following Joseph
Schumpeter, and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a
barbarian (Berlin 2002: 217). To which we might add that, regardless, there seems something
downright illiberal about the desire to have a single political ideology even liberalism govern
every country in the world.

SEE ALSO: Dirty Hands; Kantian Practical Ethics; Liberalism; Machiavelli, Niccolo; Morally
Tragic Life; Practical Reasoning; Rawls, John; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Value Pluralism;
Utilitarianism; Virtue Ethics; Williams, Bernard.

REFERENCES

Berlin, Isaiah 1964. Rationality of Value Judgments, in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.) Nomos VII:
Rational Decision. New York: Atherton Press, pp. 2213.

Berlin, Isaiah 1978. Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. Henry Hardy (ed.)
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Berlin, Isaiah 1990. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Henry
Hardy (ed.) London: John Murray.

Berlin, Isaiah 1996. Political Judgement, in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their
History. Henry Hardy (ed.) London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 4053.
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Berlin, Isaiah, 2000. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Henry Hardy
(ed.) London: Pimlico.

Berlin, Isaiah 2002. Liberty. Henry Hardy (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, Isaiah and Bernard Williams 1994. Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply, Political
Studies, vol. 41, pp. 3069.

Blattberg, Charles 2000. From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Blattberg, Charles 2009. Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies, in Patriotic

Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueens
University Press, pp. 325.

Crowder, George 2004. Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Galipeau, Claude J. 1994. Isaiah Berlins Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gray, John 1995. Isaiah Berlin. London: HarperCollins.

Jahanbegloo, Ramin 1991. Conversations with Isaiah Berlin. New York: Scribner.

Taylor, Charles 1979. Whats Wrong with Negative Liberty, in Alan Ryan (ed.) The Idea of
Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175
93.

Weinstock, Daniel M. 1997. The Graying of Berlin, Critical Review, vol. 11, pp. 481501.

Williams, Bernard 1979. Conflicts of Values, in Alan Ryan (ed.) The Idea of Freedom: Essays
in Honour of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 22132.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Crowder, George and Henry Hardy (eds.) 2007. The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Dworkin, Ronald, Mark Lilla and Robert B. Silvers (eds.) 2001. The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin.
New York: New York Review of Books.

Ignatieff, Michael 1998. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.

Margalit, Edna and Avishai (eds.) 1991. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration. London: Hogarth Press.